Many conventional and well known footwear product designs, and particularly athletic footwear product designs, include an extended tongue flap. For example, traditional baseball shoe or cleat designs and golf shoe or spike designs often include an extended tongue flap that folds over the shoe's laces. Originally, this tongue flap was included to protect the laces and to prevent dirt and other matter from damaging the laces and/or entering the shoe, e.g., when the wearer slides into a base and/or steps into a sand trap. Footwear including this extended tongue flap has become a traditional design for many footwear products.
Not all people, however, like this traditional design, believing it to be “old-fashioned,” and they prefer a more “modern” look (i.e., one without the extended tongue flap). Because products including the traditional design included the extended tongue flap as an integral and unremovable part of the tongue structure, the flap typically could not be removed without damaging the shoe, without damaging the shoe's appearance, and/or without expending considerable time, effort, and/or expense. Moreover, by producing footwear products that either included an extended tongue flap or did not include the tongue flap, each product typically was desired by and salable to only a portion of the potential market.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a footwear product that includes an easily detachable cover member for the closure system, akin in appearance to a traditional tongue flap extension or other tongue flap extension design, that would allow consumers to easily and securely include the cover member with the tongue if it is desired, to easily change cover members, if desired, and/or to easily remove the cover member from the product if it is not desired.